Saturday, April 2, 2011

Yesterday I happened upon a Republican presidential straw poll sponsored by Newsmax. The poll is actually a ruse to get you to subscribe, which tips me off as to the kind of character the people who run Newsmax have. I answered the preliminary questions, but when I got to the straw poll I noticed something very odd. There was a long list of GOP hopefuls, of some of whom I've never heard, but no Ron Paul.

Might we conclude that Newsmax is owned by the same kinds of interests that own CBS (Sumner Redstone), NBC (GE), ABC (Warren Buffett), the New York Times (Arthur Ochs Sulzberger) and Fox (Rupert Murdoch)?

Thursday, March 31, 2011

While my wife was in the Woodstock Apothecary I noticed that not a single car of 53 passing Woodstock Hardware sported an Obama bumper sticker. There were five peace sign bumper stickers (nearly a 10 percent rate), a Sunshine Fuel truck, a sheriff’s van with a work gang, and a bumper sticker that said “I Love Trees.” Also, I noticed a parked car with a sign that read “Don’t trust the corporate media.” I wonder if the dearth of Obama stickers is related to Senator Bernie Sanders’s recent proposal that a “progressive” oppose Obama. The “progressives” seem to have taken razor blades to their Obama stickers, which have gone with last summer’s flowers.

A year ago I wrote to the Woodstock Times that Obama is George Soros’s and Wall Street’s marionette. Your readers responded by (a) getting on my blog and calling me a racist and (b) implying as much on the New York Times’s blog. So much for “progressive” tolerance. By that time Obama had already handed Soros a tidy sum via Petrobas. Much worse, unbeknownst to Woodstock’s “progressives,” more money had been created and handed to wealthy banking interests than in the previous history of the United States. The amount is staggering, and because of Congressman Maurice Hinchey’s vote against a Fed audit, no one is certain how much. Bloomberg estimates $12 trillion. That’s nearly $40,000 per American in direct subsidies to financial interests. The real number might be higher, as much as $20 trillion. That doesn’t count the Fed’s ongoing billions in subsidies to the commercial banking system and Wall Street. In creating the Fed in 1913, the Democrats created an orgy of subsidy to the rich. Obama’s and Hinchey’s performance is well within the “progressive” tradition. The current battles between the Tea Parties and government employees are battles between honest working people and petit Fed beneficiaries. We Tea Partiers know whose side the “progressives” are on.

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Mitchell Langbert

About Me

I have researched and written about employee benefit issues and in my previous life was a corporate benefits administrator. I am currently associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. I hold a Ph.D. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, an MBA from UCLA and an AB from Sarah Lawrence College. I am working on a project involving public policy. I blog on academic and political topics.